Will Self - The Book of Dave

Fifteen up West, fiver from those old girls, airport run'll score me thirty or forty. Rank up in the feeder park and 'ave a snack at Doug Sherry's, run back into town — if I'm lucky — and I'll call it a night. Globular old lamp-posts with fat fish curled round them stood along the Embankment, while above the drooling Thames cast-iron lions sucked their dummies. The Millennium Wheel slowly revolved on the South Bank, its people-pods ever threatening to dip into the silty wash. Dave hugged the river, zoning out as the cab puttered up through Olympia, until they hit the Cromwell Road, where life-sized mannequins of business-class travellers advertised intercontinental seat-beds. Not real, toyist …

Not toys, son, Dave's father said, machines for entertainment. They were in the lounge bar of the Green Man out at Enfield Lock; nicotine was smeared on Paul Rudman's hair and fingers like toxic pollen. The week's take for the slot machines was racked out on the table in little pewter columns. Vince Bittern, the ex-old Bill who ran the boozer, wasn't too bothered with exact calculation. He put his flabby forearm down the middle of the table and curled it round a rough half of the stacks. Orlright, Paul? he demanded. No bother, mate, no bother, Dave's father acquiesced, lifting his wine glass of Bells to his wet lips so that the rim rattled on his denture. Dave sat in the corner, his face cherried-up with shame — Dad was so weak, so bloody hopeless …

Not toys, Dave told Carl, who was sitting on the tip seat immediately behind him, sighting back along the road, asking interminable questions — a tyrannical seven-year-old inquisitor. They're real, son. The boy howled with anger, Nooooo, stop it! Stop lying! They're not real, they're toyist.

Toyist. Dave had taken the child's coinage for his own. On good days only obvious fake things were toyist, like the giant spine stuck on a chiropractor's in old Street, or the big plug sunk into the wall of a block on Foubert's Place. But on bad days almost everything could be toyist: the Bloomberg VDU on the corner of North End Road was an outsized Game Boy, the flaring torch outside the new Marriott Hotel at Gloucester Road a lit match. The buildings themselves were so many CD towers and hair-styling wands, while people walked the street with the jerky motion of puppets, visible strings lifting styrofoam cups to their painted lips.

The fare was still at it when the cab reached the Hammersmith Flyover: 'I don't fucking care.' Beaky was still on the receiving end. 'I know how to value a company, mate, an' I tellya everything counts, bloody everything. We look at everything — we wanna drive down the asking price, we can dig as deep as we like … Yeah, yeah, I know they've sold a million bloody episodes to Taiwan, and I know they look kosher, but I've heard things concerning that Devenish — ' Devenish?! What the fuck, it can't be, think back, episodes … asking price — it figures. 'He's flash as it goes, lives in a fuck-off gaff up in Hampstead, spreads his money round like Lurpak … You can't tell me, Beaky, that it's all off the back of Bluey — or whatever that stupid kids' show is called. Someone's buying into Channel Devenish, and I wanna make certain it ain't the cunt who's selling it … I know, I know, mate, do the necessary, use who you want, put it on my research account.'

By the time — they were rolling up the Great West Road and Dave had the cab in overdrive for the first time in over a week, he'd undergone an attitude change — from surly serf to willing servant. The fare was slumped in the back seat, phone cast to one side, laptop to the other. The perspiration of bumptiousness and liquor had curdled into thick, fearful sweat on his hollow temples and tight forehead. 'Y'know what, mate?' he served up through the hatch.

'What?'

'I can't stand flying, can't bloody stand it.'

'Nor me, nor me.' Ah, poor iddle kiddie, iddums scaredums?

'Yeah, puts the kibosh on my whole bloody day.'

'Where're you off to, then, guv?' Keep him talking, I want his card.

'New York.'

The cab was rollicking along the Chiswick flyover past fifteen-storey corporate conservatories. What's through the arched window tonight? Another bank of blinking screens, another coffee machine, another yucca, another polish cleaner? There are more Poles in Ealing than fucking Cracow — at least that's what they say. 'Eye of the storm, then … do us a favour willya and see if you can persuade a few of 'em to come back this way.'

'Business bad, issit?'

'Bad, I tell you it's fucking diabolical.' Diabolical, he'll like that, he finks e's a leading actor an' 'e wants the rest of us to be supporting ones.

'Yeah, well, it's not been too clever in my line either.' And so it went on, the two men bantering as the taxi canted down off the flyover, then bumbled along the motorway. Heston Services. Moto 1 and 32. Since when has this been a Moto Services? Used to be Granada I think. Moto? Moto? Bloody stupid name for a motorway services. Bloody stupid logo as well … A man, lying back, arms behind his head, a sort of crown on his head, an atomic swirl of lines in the region of his supine belly like 'e's bin fucking gutted.

All the way up to the second Heathrow exit Dave sought a way to get the man's card out of him, but after years of minding his own business intrusiveness didn't come easily. The rain started up again as they hit the motorway spur. 'That's all I need,' said the fare; 'must make it ten times worse for those bastards in the cockpit.'

'Yeah,' Dave drawled, 'specially if their wipers ain't working.' The fare laughed gratefully — the cockney chitchat made it possible for him to let go of his nerves, get back in character.

Toyist Heathrow, a confusion of up-ended Rotadexes and fax-machine terminals. The cab pulled up to the drop-off at Terminal 3. The fare got out and stood in the damp sodium night of jet screech and taxi mutter adjusting his suit and overcoat, getting out his wallet. He gave a tenner's tip; Dave thanked him, then said, 'Receipt?' And when the fare took it and thanked him in turn, Dave went on, 'Giss yer card, mate.'

'What?'

'Give us your business card: the radio circuit I'm on are doing a raffle-type thingy for our customers. If your card gets drawn you get two hundred quid's worth of free travel in the new year.' The fare dug his card out and passed it over. Dave thanked him, wished him a merry Christmas and flicked the shift into drive. ' 'Course I'm not on the fucking radio circuit, am I, haven't been for years, I'd rather be a straightforward musher than bother with that malarkey. He looked at the card: the lettering meant nothing to him — CB & EFN INVESTMENT STRATEGIES, STEPHEN BRICE, CEO EUROPE — but he was one step closer to nailing Devenish now, pulling him off of Michelle with his wet dick gleaming in the dark, rolling the wanker over and grinding a boot into his fucking smug face.

Dave drove back out through the long, fume-filled tunnel under the runway, pulled round the roundabout and up on to the peripheral road, where there were hotels so large other hotels could have checked into them. He turned into the cul-de-sac that ran behind the police station to the taxi feeder parks. He pulled into the first one and parked up; it was a quarter full — not at all heavy for a mid evening in late December. Doug Sherry's, the taxi drivers' cafe, looked cheery enough, if you think any joint full of these mugs can be cheery. The windows and eaves were draped with tinsel, and when he'd locked up the cab and strolled into the lobby, there was a Christmas tree propped by the bins full of the drivers' free rags: Taxi, Call Sign, London Taxi Times and HALT. Tacked to the bare brick wall was a laminated poster showing a cheeky chappy cabbie's grinning mug. '233 Sexual Assaults and 45 Rapes' the caption read, 'So What's He Got to Laugh About?'